Button Island From Darwins Beagle Voyage

Button Island, Near Woollya. Copper engraving from 1838 by Thomas Landseer, art by Conrad Martens, published by Henry Colburn in Robert Fitzroy's... more

by Wellcome Images

Title

Button Island From Darwins Beagle Voyage

Artist

Wellcome Images

Medium

Photograph

Description

Button Island, Near Woollya. Copper engraving from 1838 by Thomas Landseer, art by Conrad Martens, published by Henry Colburn in Robert Fitzroy's "Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle", Volume II, 1839. Fitzroy's own agenda on the Voyage of the Beagle with Darwin was to return some native Fuegians he had taken on a previous voyage and tried to "civilize" in Britain. One of them was Jemmy Button (traded for a button) after whom this island is presumably named. Darwin shared the ship with them on the outward journey. Nothing quite prepared him for the Fuegians in a "state of nature" however. Over thirty years later he wrote in the "Descent of Man" "the astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed to my mind - such were our ancestors."

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December 21st, 2014